A hot time below the old town

  

Under City Hall

     As a subscriber to the New York Times, it's interesting to see how that paper always gets Chicago just slightly wrong.
    Take the story on the front page Wednesday, "Heat Down Below is Making the Ground Shift Under Chicago," which begins, "Underneath downtown Chicago's soaring Art Deco towers..."
     Stop right there. Is there anyone familiar with Chicago who thinks of the city first as a place of "soaring Art Deco towers"? I hope not. I mean, we have them. The gilt-topped Carbide and Carbon Building comes to mind. But our most famous deco-era skyscraper, the Tribune Tower, isn't really "deco" at all, in a design sense, but a monstrous 1920s gothic cathedral pastiche rearranged into a high-rise.
     And the most purely deco building in Chicago, if you ask me, is the Rockefeller Center knock-off NBC Tower, finished in 1989. 
     The story is of the "professor publishes a study" genus, extending climate change to the earth below our feet. In the 20th century, "the ground between the city surface and the bedrock has warmed by 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit on average."
     As to the significance of this, there is talk of unpleasant subway conditions and "tiny shifts in the ground beneath buildings, which can induce structural strain." But if the city's buildings are actually sinking and cracking, that part was left out.
     The article is based on a paper, "The silent impact of underground climate change on civil infrastructure" by Alessandro F. Rotto Loria, an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern, published Tuesday in the journal Communications Engineering. 
     The Times story is written well enough, and climate reporter Raymond Zhong gamely accompanies the professor on a tour of the white temperature sensor boxes placed underground around downtown. Perhaps the most interesting fact, deep in the story, is the CTA wouldn't permit the sensors to be placed in its stations because they were worried that passengers might see them and think they're bomb detonators.
    Otherwise, the thing struck me as something of an oversell, given its page one placement. The ground is shifting, but the buildings seem unaffected. It should have taken the next step, and reported all the cracks and crumbling foundations, if they exist. My guess is, the buildings are designed to tolerate slight shifts. 
     Given the national shame being poured on Northwestern at the moment, thanks to its football hazing scandal, for one moment I wondered if this wasn't something rushed into print, trying to provide a positive light for the old purple and white — look, we have this important study! But that's conspiratorial thinking. Sometimes random events just line up.